Global competition is putting a premium on the ability to manage risk through flexible and agile Web-enabled procurement practices. This article discusses the design of the 2007 “Supply Chain Management Procurement Challenge” (SCM-PC), a competition designed by the first three authors to evaluate the performance of mixed procurement strategies that balance risk through combinations of long-term...

the aim of this study was to examine the relationship between coaching self-efficacy and iran premier league wrestlers' sport commitment. the research method was descriptive-correlation. the wrestlers from 8 teams (n=120) including all wrestlers in iran premier league (2012) completed demographic questionnaire, coaching self-efficacy scale (feltz et al., 1999), and sport commitment questio...

Without competition, organisms would not evolve any meaningful physical or cognitive abilities. Competition can thus be understood as the driving force behind Darwinian evolution. But does this imply that more competitive environments necessarily evolve organisms with more sophisticated cognitive abilities than do less competitive environments? Or is there a tipping point at which competition d...

Species with alternative reproductive strategies are characterized by discrete differences among males in suites of traits related to competition for fertilizations. Models predict sneaker males should allocate more resources to their ejaculates because they experience sperm competition more frequently and often occupy a disfavoured 'role' owing to subordinance in intramale competition and fema...

The health care reform debate has been effective in bringing visibility nor only to cost containment issues, but to the need for expanded access to health care. The reform strategies that are currently under consideration are incremental changes that build on the transition in health care that has been underway for more than a decade. A hallmark of that transition is managed care arrangements, ...

In this paper, we investigate the performance of introducing competition in cooperative coevolutionary algorithms to solve large-scale fully-separable continuous optimization problems. It may seem that solving large-scale fully-separable functions is trivial by means of problem decomposition. In principle, due to lack of variable interaction in fullyseparable problems, any decomposition is viab...

Animals can often coordinate their actions to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. However, this can result in a social dilemma when uncertainty about the behavior of partners creates multiple fitness peaks. Strategies that minimize risk ("risk dominant") instead of maximizing reward ("payoff dominant") are favored in economic models when individuals learn behaviors that increase their payoffs...

We consider a long-term capacity investment problem in a competitive market under demand uncertainty. Two firms move sequentially in the competition and a firm’s capacity decision interacts with the other firm’s current and future capacity. Throughout the investment race, a firm can either choose to plan its investments proactively, taking into account possible responses from the other firm, or...

each organization forms its own culture in which the shared values,beliefs, and behaviours of the members of that organization come together and coalesce over period of time. in due course, the leadership style of the top management, and the norms, values and beliefs of the members combine to form the corporate culture. organizational effectiveness may be increased by creating a culture that ac...